downing text 2012_Layout 1 - Downing College - University of ...

DOWNING COLLEGE 2011–2012delegates from all over the world to Downing for the Society’s annualconference. Once again, the staff performed magnificently, and delegates werehighly complimentary about the outstanding quality of the College’senvironment, accommodation and catering. The more familiar rigours of theacademic year have been almost relaxing by comparison.During the past year, Marcus Tomalin has published several journal articles onsubjects ranging from morphological decomposition techniques for Arabicspeech recognition systems, to the teaching of French in Britain from 1750 to1830, to the role of recursion in modern syntactic theory. He has become aresearcher for both the EPSRC-funded Natural Speech Technology project(which involves Edinburgh and Sheffield Universities, as well as Cambridge)and the Feedback Analysis for User-adaptive Statistical Translation (FAUST)project. In addition, he has continued to give regular lute recitals, and, alongwith Anna Langley and The Selwyn Consort, he recorded a CD, “Milles Regretz:Music for Lutes and Voices”, in Downing chapel which was released by RegentRecords in the summer of 2012.The most important event of the academic year for Natalia Mora-Sitja was thebirth of her daughter Claudia in November 2011. When not on maternity leave,she has been working on a chapter on changes in occupational structure –workers employed in the agricultural, industrial, and service sectors – in Spainsince the nineteenth century, which will appear in an edited volume. Her pieceon work and wages in the Barcelona calico-printing factories has recentlyappeared in a volume edited by A. Sánchez, La indústria de les indianes aBarcelona, 1730–1850 (2012); and she has been awarded a small Newton Trustresearch grant for a project on ‘Gender and growth in historical perspective’that she is now kickstarting.Bill O’Neill is Director of Studies in Engineering and a Reader in LaserEngineering (and from October 1st 2012 – Professor in Laser Engineering). Hecontinues his research studies in high power laser materials processing and hasrecently been awarded a six year £2.5 million Doctoral Training Centre in UltraPrecision Technologies funded by the EPSRC. The new Centre will provideopportunities for around 40 science and engineering Ph.D. students to obtaineducation and research training in a wide range of ultra precision technologiessuch as focused ion beams, ultra fast laser technologies, and reactive atomprocessing. In addition to directing the Centre for Industrial Photonics, withinthe Institute for Manufacturing, Bill is also the Course Director for theManufacturing Engineering Tripos.189